You can now proudly inform your grandkids that in 2050, if they're still around, the global average temperature will be about 14.863 Celsius degrees even though otherwise, without the bold acts of the grandfather and millions of other great people, it would probably be frying 14.866 Celsius degrees although no one will be able to prove this assertion.
Because many readers of this blog are unfamiliar with some basic numbers and data, let me explicitly say that I am not inventing these numbers about the costs and temperature differences: they're the official numbers generated by the IPCC, the panel of the United Nations, in documentation used to support the Kyoto protocol. Of course, they had to offer these numbers for such a huge project.
Anyway, the hypothetical reduction of the temperature is our generation's contribution to the civilization: no boring cathedrals or theories of relativity: three negative millikelvins. Wow. And it was very cheap - something like 300 billion U.S. dollars. Thanks, Al Gore, for guiding us in this enlightened direction. Amen.
See Kyoto - costs and benefits.
How much money it is
Because most people don't really "feel in bones" how much is 300 billion dollars that the world has wasted for carbon indulgences in the last two years - it looks like "some number" - let me translate the number to plain English. We could have paid for either of the following projects:
- Twenty million luxury cars. Each new college student in the developed world could have received a new Chrysler 300 as a gift (see the picture)
- Tens of millions of houses in cheap markets or millions of houses in the most expensive markets: homelessness in the whole developed world, to say the least, could probably have been moved into history textbooks (there are about 1 million of homeless people in the U.S. only)
- Three billion of $100 MIT laptops, more than one for each family in the world
- Many thousands of subway stations including the tunnels and trains: each large enough city in the world could have received a new subway system
- One Freedom island; if you don't know what it is, it is a collection of 150 new Freedom towers built around Manhattan ;-)
- Two hundreds new Alaskas, assuming that Russia won't raise the price, which could quintuple the number of U.S. states ($1.67 bn is the 2007 equivalent of the original price of 7.2 million old dollars in 1867)
- Hundreds or thousands of hamburgers or sandwiches for each of 854 million hungry people across the world which could be enough for those two years; hunger could have been eliminated from the surface of earth
- Concerning the previous point, 12 million children died of hunger since the beginning of the protocol whose lives could have been saved: if you count the misplacement of the money as a result of Al Gore's work, he has just surpassed Adolf Hitler and is rapidly approaching Joseph Stalin
- Three weeks of extra vacation for every single and every married :-) working person in the world
- Two-year full fellowship for two million additional Harvard Junior Fellows (currently there are about 24 of them)
- One LHC-like collider for each country of the third world
- The full compensation for 3-5 hurricanes such as Katrina (the total hurricane damages in 2005 were $120 billion)
- More than twice the Marshall Plan: the world could pay the recovery of Western Europe from two additional wars comparable to the Second World War (the Marshall Plan costs were just $13 old billion which is $130 current billions)
- Five hundred missions to Jupiter
- Thirty times Enron's accounting errors
- Transformation of all deserts in the world to fertile land (an estimate)
Choose any item above. It has been wasted for hot air (or cold air?) in the last two years.
And unless we stop all these lunatics, this unprecedented waste of money of gigantic proportions is just a beginning: it will escalate. For example, Nicholas Stern wants to triple the spending for the policies to cool down the Earth: he demands 400 billion dollars a year. Choose three projects in the list above: this is what the megalomaniacs want to spend right now, from January 2007 until January 2009. And this may still be just a beginning. These people have no sense of proportion whatsoever.
Has everyone else lost his mind, too?
Related: carbon permits
The average price of carbon permits in 2005-2006 was 18 euro per ton.
In November 2006, we predicted that the price of carbon permits would go from 10 euro to 2 euro. The Independent just informed that the price dropped to 3.50 euro so far. This kind of assets of an average company that bought into this global fraud dropped by 80 percent.
We still predict that the price will continue to collapse towards the only right market price, namely zero, and those who organize this huge fraud based on hot air will be moving from luxurious jobs towards the places where the organizers of such schemes to steal billions of dollars usually belong.
Other often visited climate articles on The Reference Frame
- Viscount Monckton & climate fears
- Naomi Oreskes & fake unity on global warming
- Temp decided about carbon dioxide concentration, not the other way around
- IQ2 US duel: skeptics beat alarmists
- Correlations of the Sun and cosmic rays - and temp
- 2006: a lousy year for chicken little's
- 2006: coolest average temperature since 2001
